What interests me most about myths is the way we reach them. They almost always depend on that alien tenderness that makes us part of the enthusiasm of others. Even the discoveries, which we take as intimate and random, are integrated into a wider area of ​​overlooked places, unattended recommendations and parallel readings. Between what we choose as a reference and what, at some point, we disdain, there is a whole intrahistory of asymmetric generosities. In any case, whether by action or omission, myths create networks of affections , and hide (or preserve) the archeology of something that existed in another time and no longer exists.

Since my adolescence, a good part of my links is part of the internet. It is not something that worries me, because virtual life is real life and this fact is as natural to me as many others. My friendships are constantly expanding, spreading across all platforms, just like our myths. Sometimes the myth is linked to the medium: our references in instagram are usually very different from those of twitter, for example, because they respond to different traditions.

On the internet I soon discovered Sylvia Plath or Anne Sexton , while other young people of my generation also interested in that hostile and unbeatable task that is trying to write and read by scratching the canon or, at least, bordering it. It is difficult to live in circles and perimeters, but it was preferable to have to inhabit the center of things already given. We wanted our own room and we still don't have it, or we have it for rent, that is, in quotes. But our affinity was militant: reading was reading together, engaging in dialogue, building intimacy within books and also at their margins. And for that we resorted to our myths. For years I have used a cup with the face of Plath that my best friend gave me: I drank, literally, from my models, a somewhat small image but I like to talk about all this. With 15 years I read Emily Dickinson or Alejandra Pizarnik , and their readings were a way of communicating all in the same language, even aware that this was not - nor would have wanted to be - a frank language.

One day, a teacher told me that I hoped that my life could end better than my myths. To end up as Plath or as Sexton, that is, to end up being one of the best poets of his century, is undoubtedly ambitious, but he would have abandoned me with a deep masculine retreat. Some men are always angry that women have different references beyond theirs, because I fear that myths - or their use of arrogance - also imply a certain perversity; idealizations are complacent and conservative, rarely constructive. Sometimes, myths make us poorer , make us rigid or leave us isolated or in the open from what is happening outside their field. If the myths are not provisional, they do not work; on the contrary, they repress and annoy. Writing, I understand, implies establishing a saving distance, or at least placing oneself in constant suspicion of myths, which are volatile and pilgrim and clumsy entities.

Just as one is never exactly old while not losing his ability to talk with young people, one remains a teenager while retaining his ability to converse with his myths. I lost it soon, or wanted to lose it soon, and I also entered soon not in adulthood, but in this time-limbo of suspicion. My myths were discarded or replaced quickly or, in the best case, remained in hibernation for months. So I read and became obsessed, and then I filed Kristof, Nemirovsky or Lessing, with little sensitivity on my part, with an elusive affection - the model and his interlocutor. It also happened with movies, with songs, with series and, in general, with all my reference places. I understand that this gesture involved a certain identity stinging: we did not want, and I speak in the plural of modesty, to solidify ourselves.

But beyond adolescent naivety and a certain need for suspicion, there is something in that way of relating to myth, in that primitive and collective devotion of 15 years, which I continue to defend and continues to excite me: reading was something similar to being situated on a map Our myths were marks that we drew in pencil so as not to get lost , or for them to come behind, they were not lost, but ultimately, they served to return home safely. Now the grandiloquence of certain referents, or all the bodies placed in their orbit, no longer challenges me, but I am satisfied with the myths that create intimate spaces of understanding of the other. The admiration, I think, is not a vertical exercise, although for me Plath or Sexton or Pizarnik were a kind of pagan divinity that I still respect. My current myths (and now I think of Annie Ernaux or Sharon Olds or Vivian Gornick or even Sally Rooney) are human to me, and this recognition turns her reading into a luminous moment. A veneration that is discreet and suspicious and at times aware, happily aware, of its relativity, but now I share with full hands.

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